Previous efforts to detect analytes, such as biological agents, pathogens, bacteria, viruses, fungi, molecules and toxins are relatively cumbersome, time-consuming, and require significant technical expertise to operate. For example, one technique generally requires the incubation of samples on Petri plates over an extended period of several days. Another technique involves the use of dyed antibodies selected to identify the presence of specific pathogenic bacteria.
In addition, some systems require that the target biological molecules undergo an amplification procedure which is prone to errors and requires a high level of technical skill. Furthermore, amplification sometimes cannot determine the concentration of a target biological agent and are not practical for use in the field.
Some systems fail to detect natural or engineered changes in biological agents, are known to generate false positive errors and are sensitive to testing conditions. Some devices for the detection of biological molecules (such as DNA sequences or proteins) require a large number of target molecules to operate effectively. Accordingly, the target molecules must be amplified, and in some instances tagged which prevents further use of the template molecules.